Turtle

This turtle was on the other side of the state fence from my parents’ property a couple of years ago. He hung around for a couple of weeks and then disappeared. Once he was crossing the road, and some guy saved him - yowsa - I wouldn’t touch a snapping turtle for fear of getting one of my digits bit off to the quick, but the guy did, and he was alright. I named the turtle Yertle, you know, for Dr. Seuss’ ‘Yertle the Turtle’ one of my favorite childhood books. I thought this turtle was so cool!

And on this note, I’m off for a couple of days - hopefully I’ll have some interesting photos and stories for you when I blog again!

These Photos Are Wearing Me Out, and Turkeys

So today I got home and read the Digital Photography School blog’s post showing their Digital Image Editing Workflow, and I’ve discovered a couple of extra tips on how to better enhance my old slides and photos in Photoshop. So now I’m going back through the slides I’ve already enhanced and enhancing them even more. Oh my, now I’m wondering what *else* I’ll discover to help these old slides and photos.

I could have had tons of phlox and echinacea from dividing perennials today, but phlox require full sun which doesn’t happen in my yard, and I already have a ton of echinacea that I need to divide myself. So I came home and started planting my hostas and I’m in love! The right color hosta can really brighten a situation up!

Since I’m being really bad about remembering my camera for all of the photo ops I’ve been seeing, I decided to post this photo of turkeys that Mom and I saw out of our motel room while staying in Lenox, MA last September.  This photo was taken through the window:

I love their feathers!  I didn’t run this one through Photoshop, yet.

Gardening, Fall Photo

One of the things I like most about working in other peoples’ gardens this time of year is dividing perennials. There’s usually left-over perennials that they want to throw away, so I save them and bring them home to plant in my garden! Recently I acquired a variety of hostas! Yay! I’m so happy because my back yard is so shady, I’m sure they’ll thrive there. I also got some big clumps of yellow yarrow today. I’m looking forward to seeing what I’ll find tomorrow.

Here’s another fall photo from the old slide collection. This one shows a little bit of the huge veggie garden we used to have when I was growing up, mmmmm.

Oh, sometime I should scan in the photos to show the maple sugaring shed that we had! We used to gather sap from all of these wonderful sugar maples, and make excellent maple sugar, mmmmm. And maple sugar candy, mmmmm.

Family Dinner Day

I feel sad that there actually has to be a day dedicated to families having dinner together, that the norm is families don’t sit down together - ever? Not even on Saturday or Sunday? Oh well, I don’t understand it. As I continue going through my Grandparents’ slides, one of the main themes is dinner-time. We always had to have our photo taken before, during and/or after dinner, didn’t matter if your mouth was full or you were hungry or thirsty. But we were together and those are my memories. Here is my Grandmother in 1963 in front of her dinner table before a big dinner - maybe we were coming over, maybe someone else, I haven’t gotten that far in the slides yet.

I love eating dinner together with family. There’s usually plenty of good conversation and laughter. I can’t imagine being so busy that I couldn’t take time to make and eat a good dinner with family.

Beautiful Fall Tree, Bunny Update

Even though most of the trees here where I live still have green leaves, I figured I would post a 35mm slide that my Grandmother took of a tree on the land that I grew up on. The trees on this land had the most beautiful oranges, reds and yellows.

I made a CD of the slides that I’ve scanned in so far and brought it over to my parents’ home. We had a slide show on the computer - they loved it - and it’s much easier in the long run than setting up the projector, screen, moving furniture, etc.

The bunnies are still at Jim’s Mom’s home because she hasn’t been able to get in touch with the people that will hopefully take these bunnies. They went to the pet store and bought some bunny milk. Their eyes are starting to open, and their ears are not flattened down anymore. I’ll share photos when I get ahold of them. I’m just hoping they hang on until help can arrive!

Baby Bunny Help Needed

Orphan baby bunnies have been found in my animal expert’s Mother’s back yard.  :(  Don’t get me started, I am so sad.  These little babies still have their eyes closed.  First they saw one baby bunny a couple of days ago and left it alone, next morning it was dead.  Yesterday they saw five more baby bunnies all cuddled together.  So these baby bunnies are now in the house in a box with towels and a light bulb underneath to keep them warm.  They are feeding them cow’s milk in an eye dropper.  They’ve tried to see if the Mother is around, and she doesn’t seem to be.  So, what do they do with these baby bunnies to make sure they stay alive?  Where can they take them?

Book Repair

I had so much fun today, for having to be inside. New York State has a Documentary Heritage Program wherein people who work in archives can take courses in proper archival techniques. I’ve signed up for the 8 lecture series that will be given by Cornell University over fall, winter and spring, and went to the first one today, titled: “Care, Handling and Storage of Library and Archive Materials.” The two ladies from Cornell who taught this course were phenomenal! They brought discarded books where the covers were completed off from the text and broken apart, requiring us to do a Full Book Repair! I didn’t know that I would be doing this when I woke up today! Don’t mind me, if you saw my home, you would realize why I get excited - I have floor to ceiling bookshelves in every room - except the bathroom. Not only did I repair a book, I created an MM box, too! So here’s the folded up MM box (sorry the photos are bad today):

Not perfect, but it was my first time for this whole thing. Here’s the MM box opened up, and inside sits . . . the book I repaired!

Warning: These are the boring details I wrote so I can remember what I did. Skip ahead if you want to just see the photos. I had to cut the excess paper off the book covers, from the spine and down to the shoulders (without cutting into the shoulders). I had to glue cambric tape (which is linen or cotton tape - the white tape you’ll see) onto just the shoulder of each side. I used an awl to poke 5 holes from the shoulder down to two signatures on each side. I had to do an overcast stitch with linen thread through the holes. Then I glued liner on the spine. I glued spine stiffener on the buckram (the blue stuff on the outside). I put glue on the area of the buckram outside of the spine stiffener. I placed the covers on the buckram, and folded the access up around the top and bottom. Put glue on the bottom of the cambric tape so it will adhere to the cover. Then glue the buckram onto the cover. Here’s the back of the book, showing the buckram:

Here’s the front inside cover showing the cambric tape glued to the cover.

And here’s the inside of the back:

After this is all done, I took the original spine, scraped the original paper off the back, and glued it onto the buckram (sorry for the fuzzy photo):

The ladies said my book and MM box turned out really good and opened really nice - yay! I wouldn’t want to do this for a living, though, because I was sneezing and sniffing as I was scraping the old paper off the spine parts. Anyway, now that this book is nicely repaired it almost makes me want to read it!

Letchworth Park and the Results of Hurricane Ernesto

This post is way late, since I’m going back to Labor Day weekend when my parents vacationed at Letchworth Park, also known as the Grand Canyon of the north east (not quite, in my opinion, but that’s okay). They arrived on Friday, September 1st, and the Middle Falls of Letchworth looked like this:

Pretty innocent looking, right? Then two days of constant heavy rain from Hurricane Ernesto occurred. I had the responsibility of both my home and my parents’ home, watching to ensure basements didn’t flood, feeding the cat, etc. And on Sunday they took photos of the Middle Falls again:

Some difference, huh? My Dad described the falls as the water was acting like it didn’t know which direction it should go, up or down, there was just so much of it:

They also said the water roared, when normally it’s nice and peaceful.

I wanted to go on a Geology Tour of the Lower Falls on Monday, Sept 4th. The ground is normally very muddy, but with this excess water, I decided to take another tour on a better day.

These falls are part of the Genesee River, the only river I know of that flows north. Here is the dam to protect the towns in between here and Rochester, NY itself from flooding:

The water behind this dam is normally very low this time of year, but not after all of the rain. I’m not sure how tall this dam is, but when I’ve seen it in person, it seemed much bigger than this photo shows. I’m glad I wasn’t there. I would have been v-e-r-y afraid.

Scanning Old Slides, or Proof that I Climbed Trees

I’ve been scanning my grandparents’ slides in between working, and have really been enjoying the trip down memory lane. My grandmother was a real shutterbug - she would have loved a digital camera - but at the same time kind of a pain in the rear-end when you’re a kid and she asked you to stop what you’re doing while she fiddled with her camera. Now I’m thankful she was good about taking so many photos. The set I just scanned were beautiful fall scenery photos that I will share with you when it becomes fall here. For now, I found photo proof that I used to try to climb trees. Here I am as a young girl climbing an evergreen. After a couple times up and down this tree, I was forbidden because I made the tree bleed (it makes me sad that I did that):

The above slide is from the summer of ‘69. I find it really interesting that some of the slides are excellent, and some are really bad, even ones from the same batch. Go figure. The above is one that isn’t the best, but it isn’t the worst, either.

Here’s another slide of an unknown river - it could be the Lamoille River in Vermont since my grandparents travelled quite frequently to Vermont to visit family, etc. that live near this river.

It’s fun undercovering these beautiful treasures! I can barely sleep at night!

Garden Snake, Sedums

Since the sun was actually shining today and it was nice and warm, Mom and I worked in her gardens. After we were done, we saw her garden snake sunning itself - it was sitting there with its head up for quite a while. This photo is taken through a window:

This snake gets his full of snails around the gardens, as we see many empty shells scattered around.

Here’s some of the fall Sedum in blossom in Mom’s gardens:

We’re also looking at another sedum to add to this collection, called ‘Cloud Walker.’ It has pink flower heads and burgundy leaves. I love sedum of all types, because it is so hardy, and because it reminds me of southwestern plants.

And now I have some slides from my parents, so I’m off to check out how well they scan.